![]() Why isn’t my hand dropping these slices of orange onto your tongue, Diaspora? Why have I come to Brazil, Brother? To infiltrate the black movement. Is this Africa: a slit trench and a split lip, a photograph of a police chief smoking a cigar as the ear of a dead child catches his ash. I think to tell him of Katrina, but I say nothing of water- melon vines growing around the dark in graves from North Carolina to New Jersey, the bomb, MOVE, the symphony hall of atrocities in which every seat is full, but is this the meaning of diaspora? I come with the dead tucked in- to my duffle, my genocides folded into my wallet and you come with yours and we shout across the chasm of this train car comparing whose dead sing louder or more often or now. This, meaning winter rain unable to flow into the gutters because of bodies lining the streets. Do you have this in America? This, meaning kites. Soon there will be gunfire, drugs, and dead children head-to-foot along the paves and unpaved roads leading in and out of this favela. Those are suicide notes, he says, the kites. The bee above his head, the kites drifting from the hills, the white puffs of cloth, slew-footed, wading into the sky like a wasp drunk on insecticide. What are you here for? The children waiting for bottles of water to be thrown from each car. This man whom I have peeled two oranges for since this train left Rio de Janeiro and, because his hands were full, placed each quartered wedge in his mouth. Have I come to infiltrate the black movement. I will focus all my attention, now, on the man with braces, asking me if I am a member of the CIA. ![]() No, I will not focus upon the spines of the men walking these rails, yelling cerveja, coca-cola, agua, these men who bare no resemblance to ghosts but even as they pass disappear into motes and motes of dust most of us are too busy to notice falling inside a sleeping child’s mouth. I will not focus on the wasp at the window, the cat’s white hair stretching along this orange peel, or even the train’s green breath, its asthmatic clack upon these arthritic tracks that turn every head into a cautious metronome. I’m sorry I haven’t given the quetzal, or Tu Honoga, or Roger Reeves, the justice they all deserve I can’t do much for the quetzal, but I highly recommend hearing more of Reeves’ work via this video of a reading he did for Cave Canem at The New School.I will begin with braces strung across a man’s teeth as a downed kite might string itself across four lanes of a seven-lane highway and bid a barefooted child to wade into evening traffic and slip. Yet I feel there’s more here, a level I’m not aware of. There’s no flinching here the speaker takes on the human responsibility for what we’ve done to our home, our planet. The imagery here is great: “our haloes already/flat as plates and broken about our ankles” and the anthropomorphised river that speaks – cries out, perhaps – “as the pedal-less red/bicycles half-buried in its bank”, the daughter “cutting/Her ankles on cans that resemble her mother’s tongue.” Roger Geeves email address & phone number - RocketReach About Roger Reeves Academy of American Poets WebRoger D Reaves, 78. The museum as mausoleum? The imagery of death runs through this poem, and yes, of course, that’s what natural history museums are: exhibitions of dead animals.Ī note on the University of Illinois at Chicago (where Reeves is an assistant professor) website indicates this poem was inspired by a trip to the Field Museum in Chicago, where, indeed, a giant whale skeleton named Tu Hononga, and a collection of rare and extinct birds, were featured in exhibits. This ash for my daughter’s tongue, I give without ![]() Quetzal, star-throat, nightjar, grebe and artic loon: ![]() Next to the other dead and their failing trophies: It is customary to hold the dead in your mouth
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